"As time goes on we get closer to that American Dream of there being a pie cut up and shared. Usually greed and selfishness prevent that and there is always one bad apple in every barrel"
About this Quote
Danko reaches for kitchen-table imagery because he’s talking about a national promise that was always sold as something ordinary: a pie, a fair slice, a room at the table. That’s a musician’s rhetorical move - plainspoken, domestic, built to travel in a song. The American Dream isn’t framed as yachts or status; it’s framed as shareability. The line quietly challenges the Reagan-era remix of the Dream as private triumph. For Danko, the fantasy is collective: prosperity only matters if it can be portioned out.
The subtext is weary, not utopian. “As time goes on” implies patience, even inevitability, but he undercuts it immediately: greed and selfishness don’t just delay fairness, they reliably sabotage it. The “bad apple” cliché does extra work here. On the surface, it blames individual villains - the corrupt banker, the crooked boss, the politician skimming off the top. Underneath, it’s a way to talk about systems without sounding like a pamphlet. If the barrel keeps producing bad apples, maybe it’s not just the fruit.
Context matters: Danko came out of a band that mythologized working America while watching it fray. Postwar abundance gave way to deindustrialization, widening inequality, and a culture newly comfortable with winners and losers. His sentence holds that whole arc in two homespun metaphors: the pie we keep promising, and the rot we keep excusing.
The subtext is weary, not utopian. “As time goes on” implies patience, even inevitability, but he undercuts it immediately: greed and selfishness don’t just delay fairness, they reliably sabotage it. The “bad apple” cliché does extra work here. On the surface, it blames individual villains - the corrupt banker, the crooked boss, the politician skimming off the top. Underneath, it’s a way to talk about systems without sounding like a pamphlet. If the barrel keeps producing bad apples, maybe it’s not just the fruit.
Context matters: Danko came out of a band that mythologized working America while watching it fray. Postwar abundance gave way to deindustrialization, widening inequality, and a culture newly comfortable with winners and losers. His sentence holds that whole arc in two homespun metaphors: the pie we keep promising, and the rot we keep excusing.
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
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